


the poison tree

by alcibiades



Category: Manhunt: Unabomber
Genre: Brief mention of violence against animals, Letters, M/M, Pining, Wilderness, unaboyfriend
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-28
Updated: 2018-01-28
Packaged: 2019-03-10 12:14:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,137
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13501478
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alcibiades/pseuds/alcibiades
Summary: Imagine the hands of the man who wrote this letter.





	the poison tree

**Author's Note:**

  * For [meowfactory](https://archiveofourown.org/users/meowfactory/gifts).



> thank you to Shastra for beta-reading.

Imagine the hands of the man who wrote this letter.

Imagine his hands: They are a scholar’s hands, large and long-fingered, elegant. But not soft — they’re strong, rough, callused. They smell of earth and woodsmoke and fire. They smell of the first snow and the last cold rain of autumn. They smell of gardens, of the tender green heads of plants poking through the moist dirt in spring. They smell of ink and paper. Brown paper, black powder.

Imagine his hands holding the handle of an axe. Imagine him swinging it, the impact vibrating back through the axe and up his hands. Imagine the dead wood splitting. The easy rhythm his body falls into, practiced and competent.

Imagine his hands holding a rifle, aiming, firing. Imagine the smell of the gunpowder. The limp body of the rabbit, its soft fur as he runs his fingers through it. Gentle, gentle. Imagine he’s sorry, a little, that this violence is necessary. But necessary it is.

Imagine those same hands cradling the face of someone he loves. Imagine his callused fingers sliding along mandible, masseter, zygoma, occipital. His hands, holding your face with such tenderness and respect, holding something precious, something unsurpassable in its singular loveliness — but —

But he never did. He never did. He never did.

+++

The birds wake Fitz most mornings. They start singing shortly before the sun comes up, with a joy and robustness he never heard in the city. He regrets not bringing a book with him so he could identify them, but he’s created a mental catalogue of them, privately naming them based on their calls. Some he knows, the common enough urban birds — mourning doves, cardinals, the ubiquitous garrulous crows. The rest, while they remain mysteries, are becoming familiar enough.

He has a routine. He’s learned the cabin by touch now, enough that even if it’s still dark he can find his way to the bathroom to take a piss. He’s not living quite as rough as Ted; his cabin has running water, but no electricity, which suits him well enough. He has kerosene lanterns and candles if he needs them, and the fireplace. His circadian rhythm has adjusted enough that by the time night comes, he’s ready to sleep anyway.

At first he’s nervous about filling the days. He doesn’t know exactly what Ted spent his time doing, and Fitz is the first to admit his own inability to spend time in silent concentration. Ellie used to suggest sometimes that he try meditation, so he could learn to sit still. He gave it a shot, once or twice, but found he could never admit to her that the real reason he never had any success was that his least favorite place to be in the world was alone, inside his own head, with nothing to occupy him.

Anyway, what he finds is that the worry is unnecessary. The necessities of living off the land leave little time for idleness. He spends whole days tracking deer, hours that disappear into the crunch of dry leaves underfoot and the shifting clouds in the China blue sky. It turns into less hunting than following — in the end, he doesn’t shoot a single deer.

He builds snares. Spends a week breaking up ground in the back for a garden until the soil is soft and malleable. Walks the entire property to find every blackberry bramble, every patch of wild chive and mint. Sits stirring rabbit stew in a cast iron pot for hours. He goes to bed exhausted, satisfied. It’s a better feeling than he ever felt the entire time he lived in Philly, or San Francisco, or — any moment, except — except —

+++

Ted Kaczynski’s presence is so tangible that he follows Fitz around the cabin like a specter. A shadow cast over his shoulder, the whisper of a footstep making the floors creak. The funny thing is that Fitz has never met Ted. The closest he’s been to Ted is the things Ted touched; those letters, the remnants of bombs. He’s seen pictures —the raw-boned face, the wild hair — and read statistics. He’s watched the television coverage, so he’s even seen Ted in action. He’s heard recordings of Ted’s even, measured voice.

But he’s not ignorant enough to assume that’s enough to create a reasonable mental facsimile of Ted’s vital bodily presence. Really, Ted should be nothing more than an arcane collection of words and images, like a collage of evidence pinned to Fitz’s mind. And yet…and yet.

Fitz is neither superstitious, nor stupid. He doesn’t believe that, when he feels a phantom hand touch his elbow to adjust his aim on the rifle, it’s anything other than his own imagination. He knows that the sound of the laugh in his ear when he shifts, crinkling dry leaves and sending the rabbit running, is no delusion. He’s not having some kind of psychotic break. This is something he’s doing to himself.

+++

He thinks refreshingly little about his ex-wife, his children. They are behind a screen, a panel of frosted glass in his mind. Walled off like a separate life that once belonged to a separate person. His life is measured in a different way now: Before Ted. Anno Kaczynski.

This should be alarming. The attachment one forms to one’s offspring isn’t supposed to be a cord one can sever so easily. He should be overwhelmed with guilt for leaving them. They should nag his every waking moment. And if not that, there should at least be some shame at the lack of visceral emotion.

What he actually feels is a sort of lightness, an emptiness that is strangely comforting. Maybe this is the primary drive behind any man choosing to leave society behind; the freedom from the pressure of all those social ties, the obligations to think about everyone else — not just the loved ones, but the chance encounters. The cashier who looked sad at the grocery store, the woman shouting at her son in the parking lot. All those strangers whose state of mind shouldn’t have any effect, but do, those little picks in the knit of society.

The self-centeredness makes everything clearer. It’s like letting out a deep breath he didn’t know he was holding all this time. No FBI. No worrying about holding everything together. No chasing the next thing, like a greyhound chasing a fake rabbit round and round a track, unaware that it’s not going anywhere. Out here there’s just the moment, and then the next. One thing at a time.

He’s inside himself in a way that, ironically, Ellie always used to lament he never was. It feels good, settling into his own body. Dusting off the quiet unused corners of his mind.

+++

He writes letters he does not allow himself to send. All of them by hand; he’s spent so long typing, word processing, using computers, that he’s out of practice. His handwriting is rushed and sloppy. His hand hurts after covering a single page front and back. The margins are uneven, and the words go from sprawling at the top to cramped at the bottom. He looks at the page when he’s done and thinks, _how embarrassing._

Fitz can remember the advent of the Zodiac letters, which his mother assiduously forbade him from reading as a kid. He remembers hushed conversations in the kitchen: _thank god we don’t live out there, I don’t know what we’d do._ He read the letters, of course, at the public library. He remembers clearly the contradictory mountain of evidence, and the mountain of disappointment that had fallen on Cunningham, the handwriting expert. His name spoken like a curse even still in the FBI offices in the 1990s, the Zodiac a bête noir the FBI could never vanquish.

For a long time, handwriting was considered indicative of personality. The study is called graphology, a pseudoscience that, like astrology, palmistry, and phrenology, is seductive but ultimately meaningless. Still, Fitz looks at his own page of writing and wonders, what does it say?

He doesn’t really have to wonder, though. He puts himself outside his own mind, sits down inside the self of the man who wrote all those letters, and he already knows: Unfocused, imprecise, conflicted. He just wishes it wasn’t the truth.

+++

The biggest mistake he made in this whole thing was in thinking it would ever be finished. That there would be an afterwards, that he’d ever be finished with Ted Kaczynski, or that Ted would be finished with him. If only there was someone he could tell it to, who would understand: You spend that long seeking someone, and when you find them, you find yourself in them too. But the only person who would understand any of that is in a 7x12 concrete cell at ADX.

Every letter he writes, he wonders: Will this be the one I send? Is this the right one? Is this the one that says what I mean to say, nothing more and nothing less?

That’s exactly it, though — language is an imperfect tool. An ephemeral, ever-changing lexicon used for describing that which is intensely, inherently individual. Perception. There’s a reason idiolect is such a powerful categorical; every person’s vocabulary is constantly shifting as they inch closer and closer to saying what they think they really mean.

And even if you were to say what you really meant, the thing is, there’s no guarantee that the person you’re saying it to would understand. Every act of human communication is also an act of bravery. What this says about _Industrial Society and Its Future_ is obvious.

He spends a lot of time trying to puzzle out exactly why he brought Ted to that cabin. There’s the obvious motivation, of course; he had to manipulate Ted into pleading guilty. He had to show Ted exactly how bad it could get for him. But why did he do it that way? How did he know it was that moment that would break Ted? Why was that final act of desperation also an act of admiration, an act of love?

You spend that long seeking someone, and when you find them, you find yourself in them too. But the way you feel about someone like that isn’t the same as the way you feel about yourself. You could say — and many have — that man’s greatest love is the love he has for himself. But wanting the best for yourself and wanting the best for someone else aren’t the same. When you find someone like Fitz found Ted, you become strangely responsible for them.

He thinks he understands now the magnitude of what he’s done. Why he feels Ted’s watchful gaze over his shoulders some nights as he looks out the window into the dark milk-spattered sky. Why he feels discomfited by the phrase, you put him away.

+++

He’s long since burnt the other letters. Not wastefully: as kindling. They weren’t doing any good sitting in haphazard stacks on the kitchen table, the desk, the empty right side of the bed.

He sits down facing east, where the pink rays of the sun have crept over the hairy black of the treeline, and picks up his pen. This time he doesn’t write any of what he’s tried to say before. He doesn’t worry about whether to address the letter _Dear Ted,_ or _Dear Dr. Kacyznski,_ or any of it. He just starts writing.

The birds are singing as the dawn climbs higher, he writes. I still don’t know all of them, but by now I recognize the towhees, the blackbirds, and the meadowlarks immediately. He writes about the vultures that he’ll see circling lazily overhead in the midmorning sun. The feel of dry pine needles crunching under his feet, and the smell of the soil as he gets closer to the river. He writes it all, not artfully, because he’s no poet, but with the kind of detail and realism that only a dedicated profiler can manage. He puts it all down on paper, not as something petty, not for revenge, but an act of contrition, of mercy.

There is no making up for the past. Regret’s greatest value is in how it affects your decisions in the future. And he doesn’t regret it, not exactly; he knows he did what he did so that those people in the courtroom, the people Ted’s bombs killed and maimed, the bereaved and the lost, could have justice. But the thing about justice is that justice for one doesn’t mean justice for all. The thing that only people who have tangled significantly with the law understand is that justice is rarely evenly distributed.

Outside the window, a scrub jay sings its loud scolding song. Grass rustles, a deer or a rabbit maybe. He finishes the letter. He signs it, _Yours, James R. Fitzgerald_.


End file.
